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Willard is one of the most musical poets around, and only my respect for copyright law keeps me from quoting this lovely lyric in its entirety. It begins with deliberately modest restraint:

Mother gave me a yellow ball
because the day was wet and dull.
Our dining room was dark and plain.
Our living room was plain and small.

When the narrator passes through the clock's shadow, however, her plain words soon take on a chiming richness. She meets a guide, who tells her:

"All winged travelers must walk.
All those with wheels get to ride."
He did not warn me of the web
that shimmered on the other side.

Though Willard's "twilight sherbet, pansy creams, /and starlight-covered jellybeans" may be too sweet for some tastes, she undercuts them with sleeping tigers, roses astonished by the frost, and creeping shadows.

David Christiana's illustrations -- bright, muddy watercolors -- amplify the text they illustrate; too bad they didn't go further. The King of Keys plays a guitar with birds and houses for tuning pegs -- a nice addition. And when he throws the yellow ball home for the narrator, he first opens a wall between worlds by undoing an enormous zipper. It's an absurd, appropriate image. Christiana also makes some wise choices about what not to illustrate ("a hundred pencils, swift as rain" are much better left to the imagination). But I wish he hadn't given the characters such cute faces. An illustrator with a darker vision -- such as Barry Moser, who collaborated with Willard on several earlier books -- might have done a better job of keeping the occasional sweetness of the text from cloying.

What does it all mean? Like a dream, it's impossible to know, but its atmosphere will linger, full of portent and promise, all through the day. How lucky readers are that Willard's publishers trust her enough to let her get away with such beautiful nonsense.
salon.com | Sept. 28, 1999

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